(plus "right to die" and "aid-in-dying" laws) "
An assisted dying law would not result in more people dying, but in fewer people suffering."

Two national U.S. organizations, Compassion & Choices and Death with Dignity, advocate and provide information about death with dignity and right to die laws. Find out what the laws are in your state, and learn more from the articles below.
People with dementia are unable to qualify for the Death with Dignity Act because by the time they are eligible to receive a terminal diagnosis with a six-month prognosis, they are no longer deemed mentally competent.
• The Last Day of Her Life (Robin Marantz Henig, New York Times Magazine, 5-14-15) When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when? (Read this beautiful story with a tissue on hand.)
• I’m dying, and I’d like D.C.’s Death with Dignity Act to help (Mary Klein, OpEd, WashPost, 4-6-18) "I would like the option of medical aid in dying, which is authorized under D.C.’s Death with Dignity Act and that took effect in February 2017 for those terminally ill patients who meet strict requirements. The law allows mentally capable terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to get prescription medication they can decide to take if the suffering becomes unbearable, so they can die peacefully in their sleep, at home, surrounded by loved ones....March 23 also was the 20th anniversary of the first prescription for medical aid in dying in the nation, under the Oregon Death With Dignity Act, the model for medical aid-in-dying laws in the District and five other states.
• Death with Dignity Acts (Deathwithdignity.org) "Death with Dignity laws, also known as physician-assisted dying or aid-in-dying laws, stem from the basic idea that it is the terminally ill people, not government and its interference, politicians and their ideology, or religious leaders and their dogma, who should make their end-of-life decisions and determine how much pain and suffering they should endure. Death with Dignity statutes allow mentally competent adult state residents who have a terminal illness with a confirmed prognosis of having 6 or fewer months to live to voluntarily request and receive a prescription medication to hasten their inevitable, imminent death."
• The Prison Where Inmates Help Each Other Die With Dignity (Maura Ewing, Jeremy Leung, Narratively, 3-23-17) More Americans are dying behind bars than ever before. At one correctional facility (Osborn Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in northern Connecticut), volunteer death-doulas offer care and comfort to their fellow prisoners. "The mantra of hospice is “death with dignity.” It is a comfort-oriented approach to death in which quality of life is deemed as important as the number of days the patient has left. Pain management is a priority, and unlike the sterile anonymity of a hospital, hospice patients die at home or in a place that feels like home, surrounded by family. Hospice care is meant to address not just the physical needs of the dying, but their mental and emotional needs as well. Osborn’s hospice may not be as cozy as a living room, but it is a definite step up from a cell or the general medical ward down the hall. Many inmates don’t have family who are willing or able to spend their last weeks, or days, with them. So in addition to medical duties, the inmate volunteers serve as a stand-in family."
• After Colorado, ‘Right To Die’ Movement Eyes New Battlegrounds (Melissa Bailey, Kaiser Health News, 11-9-16) Fortified by a solid victory in Colorado Tuesday, a controversial campaign to let terminally ill patients access life-ending medication is moving on to other battlegrounds across the country. An overview of where such campaigns stand.
• My Right to Die: Assisted suicide, my family, and me. (Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Jan./​Feb. 2016) Framed by a particular story, this is an excellent overview of the social and legal (U.S.) history of assisted suicide, physician-assisted suicide, aid-in-dying, right to die legislation. Will assisted suicide be the next civil rights battle? Drum faces the issue himself, as little by little multiple myeloma resists his battle against it. "My choice has always been clear: I don't want to die in pain—or drugged into a stupor by pain meds—all while connected to tubes and respirators in a hospital room. When the end is near, I want to take my own life. ... I suspect that taking your own life requires a certain amount of courage, and I don't know if I have it. Probably none of us do until we're faced with it head-on." The piece concludes: 'When he signed California's right-to-die bill, Gov. Brown attached a signing statement. "I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain," he wrote. "I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn't deny that right to others."'
• Support Death with Dignity (Compassion & Choices) Nearly 7 in 10 Americans support giving terminally ill, mentally competent adults the option to access life ending drugs, yet it is not authorized in 45 states.
• Death With Dignity Should Not Be Equated With Physician Assisted Suicide (Peter Ubel, Forbes, 8-26-13)
• Death with Dignity and Palliative Care (Melissa Barber, Living with Dying blog, Death with Dignity National Center, 8-28-13).
• The Dying of the Light (Craig Bowron, Washington Post, 1-11-09) This isn't about euthanasia. It's not about spiraling health care costs. It's about the gift of life -- and death. It is about living life and death with dignity, and letting go. ...At some point in life, the only thing worse than dying is being kept alive.
• Aid-in-Dying Laws Are Just a Start (Katy Butler, Opinionator, NY Times, 7-11-15) "In the hour of our deaths, most of us will yearn not to cut short our time but for a “soft technology” of compassion, caring and interpersonal skill... To truly die with dignity, we will need good nursing, practical support, pain management and kindness. All should be better reimbursed by Medicare."
• 111 people died under California's new right-to-die law (Ben Tinker, CNN, 6-28-17) Between June 9 and December 31, 2016, 258 people initiated the process, according to the report. One hundred ninety-one people were prescribed the lethal medication, of which 111 patients "were reported by their physician to have died following ingestion of aid-in-dying drugs prescribed under EOLA....The majority of the 111 people who utilized the law were cancer patients, according to the report....In California, a mentally capable adult is eligible to partake in the End of Life Option Act if he or she is determined to have a terminal illness -- meaning they have six months or less to live. The patient must make two verbal requests of their doctor, at least 15 days apart, as well as one written request. The patient must affirm his or her request 48 hours before ingesting the medication, which they must be able to self-administer, without the help of a physician, family member or friend....Physician-assisted aid-in-dying is different from euthanasia (commonly referred to as physician-assisted suicide), which is illegal in all 50 states. Aid-in-dying advocates such as former California state Sen. Lois Wolk and state Sen. Bill Monning -- who co-authored the End of Life Option Act -- dislike the term "suicide," because it implies an impulsive and irrational act."
• My right to death with dignity (Brittany Maynard, CNN, 10-7-14) Diagnosed with terminal cancer, turning 30, a young woman chooses to die on her own terms, "Having this choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain."
• My Decision to Die: A terminal cancer patient's controversial choice (Nicole Weisensee Egan, People, 10-27-14) Headline: Terminally Ill Brittany Maynard: Why I'm Ending My Life in Less Than Three Weeks. Maynard, 29, has terminal brain cancer and has made plans to end her own life with the sedative Secobarbitol on Nov. 1 if her suffering becomes too much to handle. See links to more stories about this death-with-dignity advocate on website for The Brittany Maynard Fund. "With one six-minute video, Brittany Maynard started a global conversation about death with dignity."
• Long Legal Battle Over as Schiavo Dies (Manuel Roig-Franzia, Wash Post, 4-1-05) Florida Case Expected To Factor Into Laws For End-of-Life Rights
• Death with Dignity: The Oregon Experience by Susan Hedlund (Association for Death Education and Counseling, or ADEC)
• Why Americans Can't Die With Dignity (Mother Jones, 9-7-13) Katy Butler on overtreatment, end-of-life suffering, and the need for a Slow Medicine movement.

• A scientist just turned 104. His birthday wish is to die. (Lindsey Bever, WashPost, 4-30-18) "Goodall is set to travel more than 8,000 miles this week to Switzerland. That country, like most others, has not passed legislation legalizing assisted suicide, but under some circumstances its laws do not forbid it...For the past two decades, Goodall has been a member of Exit International, a nonprofit organization based in Australia that advocates for the legalization of euthanasia."
• Exit International
• Elderly couple got ‘deepest wish’ — to die together — in rare euthanasia case (Lindsey Bever, WashPost, 8-17-17) "They were both 91 years old and in declining health. Nic Elderhorst suffered a stroke in 2012 and more recently, his wife, Trees Elderhorst, was diagnosed with dementia, according to the Dutch newspaper, De Gelderlander. Neither wanted to live without the other, or leave this world alone....The Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia in 2002, allowing physicians to assist ailing patients in ending their lives without facing criminal prosecution."
• A terminally ill woman had one rule at her end-of-life party: No crying (Lindsy Bever, WashPost, 8-16-16) Betsy Davis had ALS. “The idea of her taking charge of her departure was something she had talked about from the early stages of the diagnosis because everyone knows where this disease goes,” Niels Alpert, a longtime friend who once dated her, told The Washington Post. “She knew she would rather take control of her final destiny before she entered total locked-in syndrome and was completely helpless.”
'California’s new law states that the patient must be at least 18 years old, terminally ill and expected to die within six months. The patient must also be mentally capable of making the decision to die and physically capable of self-administering the aid-in-dying drug, according to the law. It adds that using an aid-in-dying drug under the allowed circumstances “is not suicide” and that medical personnel and insurance companies should not treat it as such.' Related story: What I Learned Helping My Sister Use California’s New Law to End Her Life (Kelly Davis, Voice of San Diego, 8-9-16)
• I didn't like it, but this was the death she chose (Cindy Schweich Handler, Washington Post, 6-21-16) "While her pronouncement that she’s “had a good run” has left Harry and me sidelined with shock, our eldest son, Ted, understands. A graduating fourth-year medical student in Boston, he has often relayed horror stories about the hospital patients whose bodies are kept alive long after their occupants have experienced any pleasure in them."
• Life, Death & Lee (a collection of stories chronicling how Northampton resident Lee Hawkins'got the death she planned for)
---Full of life, Lee Hawkins decides to plan her death (Laurie Loisel, Daily Hampshire Gazette, 9-22-14, photos by Carol Lollis) At age 90, Lee stopped taking in food and water, a method now common enough to have its own acronym: VSED, for voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. "Neither Lee nor her doctor saw this as an act of suicide, but something far more natural." This three-part series chronicles Lee’s "decision to bring about her death and the health care workers, family members and friends who accompanied her on a journey of her choosing."
---About this series
---After decision made, time for Lee Hawkins’ slow goodbye to friends, family (9-23-14)
---Decision by Lee Hawkins to stop eating and drinking prompts new policy at VNA & Hospice of Cooley Dickinson (9-24-14) “In every state this is an option, it’s a legal option,” Kirk said. “You don’t need anybody’s permission to stop eating and drinking.”
• Aid-In-Dying Laws Only Accentuate Need For Palliative Care, Providers Say (Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News, 12-1-15) KHN staff writer Anna Gorman reports: "More times than she can count, Dr. Carin van Zyl has heard terminally ill patients beg to die. They tell her they can’t handle the pain, that the nausea is unbearable and the anxiety overwhelming. If she were in the same situation, she too would want life-ending medication, even though she doubts she would ever take it. 'I would want an escape hatch,' she said. Earlier this month, California law became the fifth — and largest — state to allow physicians to prescribe lethal medications to certain patients who ask for it."
• Dying vets cannot use life-ending drugs at many state homes (Julie Watson, AP, WashPost, 3-7-18) Suffering from heart problems, Bob Sloan told his children he wants to use California’s new law allowing life-ending drugs for the terminally ill when his disease becomes too advanced to bear. But then the 73-year-old former U.S. Army sergeant learned that because he lives at the Veterans Home of California at Yountville — the nation’s largest retirement home for veterans — he must first move out
• A Conversation About Assisted Death with Author Miriam Toews (YouTube, video) "It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other" - All My Puny Sorrows
• Voluntary stopping of eating and drinking at the end of life – a ‘systematic search and review’ giving insight into an option of hastening death in capacitated adults at the end of life (BMC Palliat Carev.13; 2014, cited on Kaiser Health News (8-21-17) This analysis of VSED research concluded that “terminally ill patients dying of dehydration or starvation do not suffer if adequate palliative care is provided.” A 2003 survey of nurses in Oregon who helped more than 100 patients with VSED deaths said they were “good” deaths, with a median score of 8 on a 9-point scale. Unlike aid-in-dying laws or rulings now in place in six states, VSED doesn’t require a government mandate or doctor’s authorization.
•
• The Traveler's Final Journey (Carrie Seidman, Herald Tribune) Dorothy Conlon's final journey took 16 days. See End-of-life resources (sidebar for Dorothy's Final Journey).
• Diane Rehm: My Husband's Slow, Deliberate Death Was Unnecessary (Maggie Fox, NBC News) Polls show that 65 percent or more of the U.S. population supports having an option available to help people choose a quicker, more painless death, Compassion & Choices says. This is different from assisted suicide or euthanasia, the group stresses. “Assisted suicide is a crime in many states, including Oregon and Washington, where aid in dying is legal,” the group says....Compassion & Choices says it doesn't support euthanasia or "mercy killing," "because someone else — not the dying person — chooses and acts to cause death." What is called euthanasia and is legal in some European countries more closely resembles what the group calls aid in dying. “We do not let our little animals suffer and people shouldn’t have to suffer.” John Rehm had to deliberately die by dehydration. It took nine days. “John said he felt betrayed,” Rehm said. He said, ‘I felt that when the time came, you would be able to help me.’”
• Diane Rehm Advocates for Aid in Dying Nationwide After Husband’s Painful Death From Parkinson’s (Compassion & Choices)
• NPR host Diane Rehm's disclosure about her husband's death puts light on end-of-life choice (Jodie Tillman, Tampa Bay Times, 7-11-14) A more complete piece than most of them on this story.
• To Achieve Radical Change End-Of-Life Providers Need To Address Some Home Truths (Lloyd Riley, HuffPost, 5-23-17) Dr BJ Miller, a consultant in palliative medicine "passionately believes in the principle of person-centeredness that underpins end-of-life care and argues that the shift away from over-medicalization must be adopted by other specialties." One needn't choose between "assisted dying" and improved end-of-life care. "Dying people need to be involved in decisions about their care; and treatment preferences need to be recorded, shared and acted upon. Doctors are central to this -- caring for dying people as they want to be cared for should be seen as fundamental, not desirable. " But "fear of expressing support for assisted dying within the palliative care community in the UK is widespread." "Dying people need to know their voice matters and legalizing assisted dying can bring about the culture change the medical profession repeatedly calls for."

Useful general links

A Life-or-Death Situation (Robin Marantz Henig, NY Times Magazine, 7-17-13). A Right to Die, a Will to Live: As a bioethicist, Peggy Battin fought for the right of people to end their own lives. Suffering, suicide, euthanasia, a dignified death — these were subjects she had thought and written about for years, and suddenly, after her husband’s cycling accident, they turned unbearably personal. Follow-up story: Choosing to Die After a Struggle With Life (Henig, The 6th Floor, NY Times, 8-21-13) On Saturday, July 27, six days after the article was published in print, , Brooke Hopkins finally decided he’d had enough. "Later, Peggy told the Tribune reporter, Peggy Fletcher Stack, that 'it was peaceful and painless, just as he wanted it' — close to the kind of ending he described to me earlier as a 'generous death.'" Here's a video slideshow of about the peaceful end of Brooke Hopkins' life (Peggy Fletcher Stack, Salt Lake Tribune, 8-29-13

• Nukes (Latif Nasser, Radiolab, 4-7-17) President Richard Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people. Such is the power of the US President over the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the order? If you're worried about the dangers of nuclear war, check out the excellent links alongside this thoughtful piece.

A Life Worth Ending (Michael Wolff, NY Times Magazine, 5-20-12). The era of medical miracles has created a new phase of aging, as far from living as it is from dying. A son’s plea to let his mother go. I agree with Robin Henig: ""One of the most beautifully done, searing articles I've ever read about death in the age of medical intrusion." Quoting from the article: "The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are – through careful diet, diligent exercise and attentive medical scrutiny – the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death’s appointment – though far, far, far from healthy."

At the end of a loved one's life, why is it so hard to let go? (Craig Bowron, Washington Post, 2-22-12). Craig Bowron is a hospital-based internist in Minneapolis. "When families talk about letting their loved ones die 'naturally,' they often mean 'in their sleep' — not from a treatable illness such as a stroke, cancer or an infection. Choosing to let a loved one pass away by not treating an illness feels too complicit; conversely, choosing treatment that will push a patient into further suffering somehow feels like taking care of him. While it's easy to empathize with these family members' wishes, what they don't appreciate is that very few elderly patients are lucky enough to die in their sleep. Almost everyone dies of something."

UNNATURAL CAUSES | SICK AND DYING IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA (Washington Post series, April 8, 2016)
• ‘We don’t know why it came to this’ ( Eli Saslow, Washington Post, 4-8-16) As white women between 25 and 55 die at spiking rates, a close look at one tragedy, in rural Oklahoma.
• A new divide in American death (Joel Achenbach, Dan Keating, Washington Post, 4-8-16) An urban-rural mortality gap emerges among whites as risky behaviors work to defy modern trends. White women and men in small cities and rural areas are dying at much higher rates than in 1990, while whites in the largest cities and their suburbs have steady or declining death rates. INCREASING DEATH RATES: From 1990 through 2014, the mortality rate for white women rose in most parts of the country, particularly around small cities and in rural areas. Rates often went up by more than 40 percent and, in some places, doubled. DECLINING DEATH RATES: Mortality rates were most likely to decline in the Northeast corridor and in large cities that anchor metropolitan areas of more than a million people, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis and Houston.
• Some regions are hit especially hard, such as the belt of poverty and pain that runs across the northern tier of the South, incorporating much of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. But significant increases in white mortality also showed up in the small-town and rural Midwest — such as Johnson County, Iowa, home of the University of Iowa — and in parts of the American West, such as Nye County, Nev., and Siskiyou County, Calif.
• Multiple factors are converging to produce this corrosion of American health. Foremost is an epidemic of opioid and heroin overdoses that has been particularly devastating in working-class and rural communities.
• Another killer is related to heavy drinking. Deaths of rural white women in their early 50s from cirrhosis of the liver have doubled since the end of the 20th century, The Post found.
• Suicides are also on the rise. The suicide rate is climbing for white women of all ages and has more than doubled for rural white women ages 50 to 54.
• Other trends may be contributing to the die-off, including obesity.
• Where living poor means dying young (Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham, WaPo, 4-11-16) Men in the bottom income quartile live longer along the West Coast than in Las Vegas, Louisville and industrial Midwest towns, such as Gary, Ind. Life "expectancies continuously rise with income in America: The modestly poor live longer than the very poor, and the super-rich live longer than the merely rich." "...places with high shares of college graduates, high population density, high home values and high government expenditures per capita were correlated with better life expectancies for the poor. In some ways, this finding is surprising..."

Compassionate Friends (national self-help organization for help grieving the loss of a child of any age). Resources include a Chapter Locator and online brochures on topics ranging from Understanding Grief, Sudden Death, Surviving Your Child's Suicide or Homicide, The Death of an Adult Child, Death of a Special-Needs Child, Adults Grieving the Death of a Sibling, Suggestions for Various Professionals Dealing with Someone's Loss of a Child. Compassionate Friends' credo: The Compassionate Friends credo: "We reach out to each other in love to share the pain as well as the joy, share the anger as well as the peace, share the faith as well as the doubts, and help each other to grieve as well as to grow. We need not walk alone. We are The Compassionate Friends." Here Linton Weeks describes the healing that goes on at a Compassionate Friends conference. He writes: "No matter how your child dies, there is an undeniable sense of failure among bereaved parents. Jan and I are haunted by Stone's and Holt's violent, senseless deaths, and all of the wrongs that can never be righted. Including the biggest of them all — we could not save our sons from death. We should have been the ones who died first, not our precious boys. We carry that guilt in our already shattered hearts, and we relearn every morning when we wake up that the loss of our children is something we will never get over. Or past. Or through." The Compassionate Friends conference brings together parents isolated from their friends, family, work by pain and inexperience with such loss.

‘Everyone Welcome’—Even Now (Chris Buice, The Daily Beast, 1-9-09). After a senseless act of violence in our church, we did not give in to anger. We sought a better way.

A Facebook story: A mother's joy and a family's sorrow. Ian Shapira, Washington Post, has edited and annotated Shana Greatman Swers Facebook page to tell her story from pre-baby date nights to a medical odyssey that turned the ecstasy of childbirth into a struggle for life.

Farrah Fawcett's Long Goodbye (Jim Rutenberg, NY Times, 5-27-11). Dying of cancer, she authorized a documentary of her final days. "Ms. Fawcett had intended the film to address shortcomings she saw in American cancer treatment and to present it in art-house style....After [Ryan] O’Neal and NBC gained full control of the documentary, the film took on the feel of network celebrity fodder — at once more glossy and more morbid....Many scenes addressing the American medical system were scrapped or truncated." Her final story became the object of a lengthy battle.

The Good Short Life by Dudley Clendinen (NYTimes, 7-9-11). Living with Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) is about life, when you know there's not much left. And Writer Dudley Clendinen has chosen not to go to the great expense and limited potential of extending his life--but to enjoy what he can of it, while he can. He learned he had the disease when he was 66, and Maryland Morning, an NPR news station, has been airing conversations with him about how he and his daughter Whitney have been dealing with the disease and its implications. Listen to the podcasts

The Guardians: An Elegy by Sarah Manguso. “A bittersweet elegy to a friend who ‘eloped’ from a locked psychiatric ward . . . [Manguso] explores the extent to which we are our friends’ guardians and, in outliving them, the guardians of their memory . . . Manguso’s writing manages, in carefully honed bursts of pointed, poetic observation, to transcend the darkness and turn it into something beautiful. The results are also deeply instructive, not in the manner we’ve come to fatuously call “self-help” but in the way that good literature expands and illuminates our realm of experience.” —Heller McAlpin, Barnes and Noble Review

How to Die by Joe Klein, reads the cover of Time Magazine (June 11, 2012). Inside the story is called "The Long Goodbye." Klein writes about the dramatic improvement in his parents' care when they were moved to a facility with no incentives for unnecessary interventions. "For five months, I was my parents' death panel. And where the costly chaos of Medicare failed, a team of salaried doctors and nurses offered a better way."

If You Have Dementia, Can You Hasten Death As You Wished? (Robin Marantz Henig, All Things Considered, NPR, 2-10-15). Choosing an endgame is all but impossible if you're headed toward dementia and you wait too long. Part of what happens in a dementing illness is that the essential nature of the individual shifts. Listen or read transcript.

In death, a promise for the future. As her world diminished, Elizabeth Uyehara signed her body over to researchers to help unravel the mystery of Lou Gehrig's disease. (Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, 8-28-10, on the course of Uyehara's ALS and on what happens when organs are donated for science)

Let's talk about dying (Lillian B. Rubin, Salon.com, 12-27-12). "At 88 and ailing, I refuse to live at any cost. I only hope that when the time comes, I'll have the courage to act. ... At 88-going-on-89 and not in great health, what’s cowardly about my deciding to turn out the lights before putting my family through the same pain they’ve already lived through with their father and grandfather? What’s courageous about spending our children’s inheritance just so we can live one more month, one more year? Is it courage or cowardice to insist on staying alive at enormous social cost – 27.4 percent of the Medicare budget spent in the last year of life – while so many children in our nation go hungry and without medical care?"

'Making Toast': Simple Gestures for Moving On, National Public Radio story and review of Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, which E.L. Doctorow describes thus: "A painfully beautiful memoir telling how grandparents are made over into parents, how people die out of order, how time goes backwards. Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive."

Months to Live, Palliative Care Doctor Fought for Life (Anemona Hartocollis, NYTimes, 4-3-10). Desiree Pardi the palliative care doctor who believed in a peaceful death, chose at the end of her own life to endure a lot, even though she knew deep inside "this was not fixable," because she wasn't ready to let go.

Moving Away From Death Panels: Health Reform for the Way We Die (Ira Byock, The Atlantic, 3-6-12). There is surprisingly little disagreement about what constitutes good care at the end of life, but we still can't seem to fix any of our problems. It's time for conservatives and progressives to declare a truce before we lose opportunities for health reform to improve the way Americans are cared for and die.

Music for Funerals and Memorial Services. This could be a healing part of the process of burying the dead. Here are links to samples of selections that may help you remember the good times, and mourn the end of the life.

Out of This World (Pulse: Voices from the heart of medicine). Fourth-year medical student Katelyn Mohrbacher on the family's and medical staff's experience with an eighty-year-old man in a persistent coma.

Sick and Tired (Paul Rousseau, in Pulse: Voices from the heart of medicine). A mother being kept alive by transfusions is sick of them and must decide whether to continue for the sake of her daughter.

Resources for when terminal or life-threatening illness requires decisions about what individuals, families, and professional caregivers should do
• Five Wishes lets your family and doctors know:
---Who you want to make health care decisions for you when you can't make them.
---The kind of medical treatment you want or don't want.
---How comfortable you want to be.
---How you want people to treat you.
---What you want your loved ones to know.

• When Prolonging Death Seems Worse Than Death (Fresh Air from WHYY, 10-11-12). Terry Gross interview Judith Schwarz, who helps dying patients and their families decide whether and how to hasten the end. Compassion & Choices is an organization that helps terminally ill patients and their families make informed and thoughtful end-of-life decisions. Schwartz discusses the practicalities of various choices.

Silver Anniversary. Amy Schapiro's moving account of the three things Millicent Fenwick wanted to do before she died and how she did them.

• Choosing Wisely, an initiative of the ABIM Foundation to help providers and patients engage in conversations to reduce overuse of tests and procedures, and support patients in their efforts to make smart and effective care choices. See Choosing Wisely lists (resources for consumers and providers to engage in conversations about the overuse of medical tests and procedures that provide little benefit and in some cases harm):
---Clinician lists
---Patient-friendly resources

• Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler. An expertly reported memoir and exposé of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care—based on Butler’s acclaimed NY Times Magazine piece What Broke My Father’s Heart. Against a backdrop of familial love, wrenching moral choices, and redemption, Butler celebrates the inventors of the 1950s who cobbled together lifesaving machines like the pacemaker—and she exposes the tangled marriage of technology, medicine, and commerce that gave us a modern way of death: more painful, expensive, and prolonged than ever before.

• Oregon Emphasizes Choices At The End Of Life (Kristian Foden-Vencil, Shots, NPR Health News, 3-8-12) It turns out Americans facing death want something they also want in life: choice. A two-page form created in Oregon is providing insight into how people want to be cared for at the end of their lives. And the so-called POLST form — short for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment — offers far more detailed options than a simple "do not resuscitate" directive does.

• An Impossible Choice: Deciding When a Life Is No Longer Worth Living ( Joanne Faryon, inewsource, ) An award-winning article by an investigative reporter -- a rare look inside a subacute unit in Coronado, Calif., one of hundreds statewide that house more than 4000 life-support patients. Berger award description: Their groundbreaking story looks at “vent farms,” the 125 care facilities across the state of California housing 4,000 patients being kept alive by machine. This number has doubled in the past decade due to advances in medicine. Many of these people appear to have no cognitive ability. All would perish if the machines were turned off. The number of people kept alive by artificial means has nearly doubled in the past decade. The average age of people who live in subacute care is 56. Subacute made so much money it subsidized the hospital’s emergency room and surgical unit. One week on life support can cost more than an entire year of health care for the average person enrolled in Medi-Cal.

• A Family Says 'Enough' (Paula Span, Health, NY Times, 9-12-13). Before you agree to that pacemaker, know how hard it might be to undo. Deactivating an implanted cardiac device is neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and a doctor who feels morally unable to do it should find a colleague willing to help. The end of Katy Butler's story.

• The Best Possible Day (Atul Gawande, NY Times, 10-5-14) If you are dying, how do you want to spend your time? People who are seriously ill might have different needs and expectations than family members predict, "Hospice’s aim, at least in theory,... is to give people their best possible day, however they might define it under the circumstances." Asking the right questions might help us figure out how to make such the best possible day happen.

• Our unrealistic views of death through a doctor's eyes (Craig Bowron, Washington Post, 2-17-12) When 'we did all we could' is the worst kind of medicine." In elderly patients with a web of medical conditions, the potential complications of any therapy are often large and the benefits small....At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture.

• Too much intervention makes patients sicker (Aseem Malhotra, The Guardian, 7-19-14) A culture of over-investigation and over-treatment is now one of the greatest threats to western health...Even respected medical guideline panels appear to be influenced by corporate interests....a campaign known as Choosing Wisely is gaining momentum in the US. Part of the campaign involves communicating with patients that more expensive medicine doesn't necessarily mean better medicine. And this is reflected by the evidence that four fifths of new drugs are later found to be copies of old ones – not surprising perhaps when pharmaceutical companies spend twice as much on marketing new medications as on research.... Sometimes "doing nothing is the best approach. Questions such as: do I really need this test or procedure? What are the risks? Are there simpler safer options? What happens if I do nothing? And even how much does it cost?"

• The case for slow medicine (Richard Smith, BMJ, 12-17-12) "The characteristics of health systems are complexity, uncertainty, opacity, poor measurement, variability in decision making, asymmetry of information, conflict of interest, and corruption....It is time, said Domenighetti, to open up the black box of healthcare."

• When Did We Get So Old? (Michele Willens, Sunday Review, NY Times, 8-30-14) For boomers, the “what, me, get old?” generation, denial of aging is an important and difficult issue to tackle. “I had almost always been the youngest through most of my career,” says the former media executive. “Now I was the oldest, and it caused great discomfort.”

• Letting Go (Atul Gawande, New Yorker, 8-2-10). What should medicine do when it can't save your life? Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.

*** How to Talk End-of-Life Care with a Dying Patient (video, Atul Gawande speaking at New Yorker festival, 10-12-10) An expert tells him what to ask patients about. Do they know their prognosis? What are their fears of what is to come? What are their goals--what would they like to do as time runs short? What tradeoffs are they willing to make? How much suffering are they willing to go through for the sake of added time? There is no checklist to mark off--instead, you need a series of conversations.

• Finding Liberation in Two Deaths (Jamie Brickhouse, The End, Opinionator, NY Times, 4-25-15, from his memoir, Dangerous When Wet) The last time I wished my mother dead, I meant it.... she was in what I now know were the final stages of Lewy body dementia." As one reviewer calls it, "a dark journey studded with gems of hilarity."

• Re-Examining End-Of-Life Care (Laura Knoy with guestsPatrick Clary – doctor at the New Hampshire Palliative Care Service in Portsmouth; John Loughnane – medical director at Commonwealth Community Care in Boston, on New Hampshire Public Radio 8-28-13)

• A Graceful Exit: Taking Charge at the End of Life (Claudia Rowe, Yes! magazine, 9-19-12) How can we break the silence about what happens when we’re dying? The best thing to come out of Compassion & Choices’ campaign (informed choices about how we die) may be a peace of mind that allows us to soldier on, knowing we can control the manner of our death, even if we never choose to exercise that power.

• Let's talk about dying (Peter Saul's TED talk, Nov 2011) We can't control if we'll die, but we can “occupy death,” says Dr. Peter Saul, an Australian intensive care doctor (intensivist) who is passionate about improving the ways we die. He calls on us to make clear our preferences for end of life care -- and suggests two questions for starting the conversation.

• Quiet deaths don't come easy (Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, 2-5-12) A study finds that Medicare patients near death are increasingly choosing hospice or palliative care over heroic measures in their last days — but that many go through futile hospitalizations and treatments first. "Doctors often fail to be clear about a patient's poor prognosis and to plainly state the likely consequences of continuing painful, aggressive care." If a patient's wish to avoid aggressive treatment is clear, "you need to prevent him from getting into that cycle of acute care," gerontologist Julie Bynum said, "because once they get into the hospital, it's really hard to get them out."

Terminology is a problem in discussing this subject. What supporters call "aid-in-dying" or "death with dignity," opponents call "assisted suicide" or "physician-assisted suicide," emotionally freighted phrases that cannot capture the choices individuals and families face in the presence of prolonged illness.
• Don’t let polarizing politics derail how we talk about death (Ellen Goodman, WaPo editorial, 6-6-16) "...in Oregon, the first state to pass a “Death With Dignity Act,” only one out of every 500 deaths comes from doctor-ordered medication. So why are we spending so much political energy to help the one rather than the 499? ...Too many of us do not die in the way we would choose. Too many survivors are left guilty, depressed and bereft. Rather than just offering a few patients the 'comfort and dignity' of lethal medication, we need to assure everyone the comfort and dignity of a humane, caring ending. "
• It’s not pain but ‘existential distress’ that leads people to assisted suicide, study suggests (Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post, 5-26-17) A study released "in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests the answers may be surprising: The reasons patients gave for wanting to end their lives had more to do with psychological suffering than physical suffering....“It's what I call existential distress,” explained researcher Madeline Li, an associate professor at University of Toronto. “Their quality of life is not what they want. They are mostly educated and affluent — people who are used to being successful and in control of their lives, and it’s how they want their death to be.” "One of the main things these patients bring up has to do with 'autonomy.' It's a broad philosophical concept that has to do with being able to make your own decisions, not being dependent on others, wanting to be able to enjoy the things you enjoy and wanting dignity." “'For the terminally ill like Brittany, it's not a choice between not living and dying. The fact that she would die is a given. It was about the manner in which a person will die. She was literally been tortured to death. What she wanted was having the option to pass away gently,' he said."
• Another Word for It (I highly recommend this essay by Alison Lester, about her father's death in 2010). Lester writes of this essay (in a comment about a RadioLab podcast, The Bitter End) "My father owned the way he wanted to die in a way that had us all in awe." Lester's essay "covers what it was about him that made it possible for him to decide how to end his life and see that decision through, and what it required from us as a family. It is my fervent hope that this account of his death can help people facing similar situations."
• Despite Sweeping Aid-In-Dying Law, Few Will Have That Option (Robin Marantz Henig, Shots, NPR, 10-7-15)
• She’s Accused of Texting Him to Suicide. Is That Enough to Convict? (Jess Bidgood, NY Times, 6-6-17) To what extent can one person be responsible — and criminally liable — for the suicide of another person?
• It’s Time to Reinvigorate the Constitutional Claim for Physician Assistance in Dying (Norman L. Cantor, Bill of Health, Harvard Law, 4-30-18) A rational approach to the subject.
• Online Talk, Suicides and a Thorny Court Case (Monica Davey, NY times, 5-13-10) 'Groups that work to prevent suicide compare suicide chat rooms to “pro-ana” sites, Internet sites that portray anorexia as a lifestyle as opposed to a disease. Anti-suicide advocates say that there has been more than one instance recently where a person killed himself on a Webcam as others watched. Papyrus, a charity in Britain that works to stop young people from killing themselves, says it has tracked 39 cases in that country alone where young people committed suicide after visits to “pro-suicide” chat rooms.'
• Bullying, Suicide, Punishment (John Schwartz, NY times, 10-2-10) What should the punishment be for acts like cyberbullying and online humiliation? “Those students who are face-to-face bullied, and/​or cyberbullied, face increased risk for depression, PTSD, and suicidal attempts and ideation,” Professor Blumenfeld said. For all the talk of cyberbullying, the state statute regarding that particular crime seems ill suited to Tyler Clementi’s suicide.
• When my time comes, I want the option of an assisted death (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, WaPo editorial, 10-6-16) "I have been fortunate to have long spent my time working for dignity for the living. Now, with my life closer to its end than its beginning, I wish to help give people dignity in dying. Dying people should have the right to choose how and when they leave Mother Earth. I believe that, alongside the wonderful palliative care that exists, their choices should include a dignified assisted death."
• Freedom to kill, permission to die (Kathleen Parker, WaPo, 6-10-16) "I’d like to have the means to end my own life on my own terms when my body has clearly called it quits. I’m just not sure I like the idea of the state and doctors lending a hand."
• Lawsuit Seeks to Legalize Doctor-Assisted Suicide for Terminally Ill Patients in New York (Anemona Hartocollis, NY Times, 2-3-15) A group of doctors and terminally ill patients are asking New York courts to declare that doctor-assisted suicide is legal and not covered by the state’s prohibition on helping people take their own lives. Assisted suicide — advocates prefer the term “aid in dying” — is legal in only a few states, including Montana, Washington, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont. The author lays out the arguments for and against.
• Cancer Patients and Doctors Struggle to Predict Survival (Amanda Aronczyk, Shots, NPR, 2-10-15) "...prognoses are almost never that clear-cut, despite the fact that patients need to make big decisions based on those numbers. Should she quit her job? Take that dream cruise? Write a living will? Physicians play a part in the confusion, too. Doctors consistently overestimate how long a patient has to live... And if patients think a doctor is doing a good job of communicating with them, they're more likely to be erroneously optimistic about a cure. That can keep patients from fulfilling key goals before they die."...Sometimes a family's desire to "think positive" can make people reluctant to bring up death or dying. "And the end result is that the patient is left alone with his fear of dying and he can't speak to anyone about it." Levin also wants the doctors to make it clear to their patients that they will not abandon them if the worst-case scenario comes to pass.
• Sharlotte Hydorn of GLADD exit bags dies at 94 (Faye Girsh, ERGO, Assisted Dying blog, 12-13-13) "...she did so much to give people around the world the comfort and reassurance of a peaceful death by making and distributing her GLADD exit bags. GLADD = Good Life and Dignified Death." A story in which it's not always clear who the good guys are.
• A Candid Conversation with Public Radio's Diane Rehm (Part 1). Public radio host Diane Rehm‘s new book “On My Own” details her husband’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and her decision to support “right to choose to die,” as she puts it, after John Rehm was denied assisted suicide and starved himself to death. In the first of a two-part interview, Here & Now’s Robin Young speaks with Rehm about her often fraught marriage and her husband’s illness. Part 2, an excerpt from Rehm's book On My OwnWhen John Rehm could not legally receive medically aid to die comfortably (his state didn't allow it), he followed his doctor’s suggestion and starved himself to death. The experience set Rehm on a path to better understanding medically assisted death, which is only legal in a handful of states.
• The terminal confusion of Dignity in Dying (Jenny McCartney, The Spectator, UK, 7-5-14) The closer you look at the campaign in the UK to legalize assisted dying, the less reassuring it all becomes. What is this clause of ‘six months or less’ to live? As most doctors know, such diagnoses can be deeply unreliable. And by what logic do we attach an ‘assisted death’ to a six-month prognosis but not, say, that of a year?... If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its sing-song theme is probably still lodged in your memory: ‘Suicide is painless/​ It brings on many changes/​ And I can take or leave it if I please’. However catchy, it is broadly untrue. The human life force is stubborn, and it takes a visceral struggle to extinguish it. Suicide, as commonly practised by amateurs, is not painless: it is frequently agonising, complicated, botched and has ample potential to leave one still alive but with a cruel legacy of permanently damaged health to add to one’s existing woes.
• The right to regret by Kathleen Parker. "Freedom to kill, permission to die." I’d like to have the means to end my own life on my own terms when my body has clearly called it quits. I’m just not sure I like the idea of the state and doctors lending a hand....Will the right to die ultimately be considered as just another facet of “health care,” as abortion is? And when do six months become a year? A novelist would propose that it’s just a matter of time before a glut of elderly people in poor health, who are by definition 'terminal,'; so overwhelm the health-care system that 'opting out' becomes an expectation rather than a choice."
• Assisted suicide compromise (Arthur Caplan and Wesley J. Smith, USA Today, 11-13-14). As matters stand, the law requires patients considering hospice to make an awful choice. In exchange for insurance paying for hospice care — which focuses on pain control, symptom management and social support — the patient must forgo all other forms of treatment. As Ira Byock says, "A third of all U.S. hospice patients die within a week of being admitted. Thus, because of the 'terrible choice' Medicare rules impose, hospice is not doing end-of-life care as much as brink-of-death care."

• The Hemlock Society, a right-to-die organization founded in Santa Monica, California, by Derek Humphrey, merged with and changed its name to Compassion & Choices in 2003, helping with end-of-life consultation.
• Frequently asked questions, Death with Dignity National Center
• Physician-assisted death vs. euthanasia (explanation for journalists, Association of Health Care Journalists). See also AHCJ's explanation of physician-assisted suicide
• Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (BBC). Types of euthanasia, arguments for and against, good deaths and the practicalities of dying, legislation, religious views
• Sir Terry Pratchett - Shaking Hands with Death (YouTube video) Sir Terry Pratchett gives 34th Richard Dimbleby Lecture from the Royal College of Physicians in London. 2010. Sir Terry Pratchett announced in 2007 that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. In this keynote lecture, he explores how modern society, confronted with an increasingly older population, many of whom will suffer from incurable illnesses, needs to redefine how it deals with death.
• Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, all sides to the issue, ReligiousTolerance.org, Ontario consultants on religious tolerance)
• A method for dying with dignity (Marcia Angell, Boston Globe, 9-29-12) This is not a matter of life versus death, but about the timing and manner of an inevitable death. We respect people’s right to self-determination when they’re healthy. That shouldn’t be denied to them when they’re dying.
• Government lawyer draws line between euthanasia and war (Marc Hume, Vancouver, Globe and Mail, 12-8-11). Read the comments, too.
• Listen on Interfaith Radio to"Bioethics and the Legacy of 'Dr. Death,' which includes interesting segments on dying with dignity (individuals having some control over when they die, particularly if they're heading toward the painful end of a terminal condition: After a segment in which Michael Schermer tells how our brains are hard-wired for "beliefs," listen to Should Doctors Hasten Death? (starts at 21 min 36 seconds), in which bioethicist Art Caplan explains the pros and cons of one of the most controversial practices in both religion and medicine. (You can listen to full segment here . A third segment is Making the Choice: Merrily's Story (begins at 33 min. 46 sec.). One important point: Knowing that they have some choice allows patients who are terminally ill to relax and accept the natural course of death; only 10% of those who knew they had the option to end their life with medication did so.
• Where the prescription for autism can be death (Charles Lane, WaPo, 2-24-16) "...a man in his 30s whose only diagnosis was autism become one of 110 people to be euthanized for mental disorders in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2014. That’s the rough equivalent of 2,000 people in the United States....doctors from elsewhere are starting to apply independent scrutiny to the increasingly common euthanasia of Holland’s mentally ill, and their findings are not so reassuring. To the contrary."
• Hastening Death, information and arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide (from online edition of HANDBOOK FOR MORTALS by Joanne Lynn and Joan Harrold

• Scarred by school shootings (John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich, Washington Post, 3-23-18) More than 187,000 students have been exposed to gun violence at school since Columbine, The Washington Post found. Many are never the same. 13 dead at Columbine (in 1999). 26 dead at Sandy Hook. 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. "In total, The Post found an average of 10 school shootings per year since Columbine, with a low of five in 2002 and a high of 15 in 2014. Less than three months into 2018, there have been 11 shootings, already making this year among the worst on record."
• Texas Governor Scraps Campaign Contest to Give Away Shotgun (Daniel Victor, NY Times, 5-21-18) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas’ re-election campaign scrapped its plan to give away a shotgun in a contest after a high school student used a shotgun and a handgun to kill 10 people in the state on Friday. The campaign created its contest in early May, well before Santa Fe High School, about 35 miles southeast of Houston, became the nation’s latest scene of bloodshed inside a school. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, has been charged with capital murder in the killing of 10 people
• More than 210,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine (John Woodrow Cox, Steven Rich, Allyson Chiu, John Muyskens and Monica Ulmanu, Wash Post, 4-23-18)
• March for Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting Guns Say ‘Enough Is Enough’ (NY Times, 3-24-18)
• The National Domestic Violence Hotline Our advocates are available 24/​7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) in more than 200 languages. Safety Alert: Computer use can be monitored and is impossible to completely clear. If you are afraid your internet usage might be monitored, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233 or TTY 1−800−787−3224.
• National Hotlines and Helpful Links (National Center for Victims of Crime) Many helpful links and phone numbers.
• Parents and Students Plead With Trump: ‘How Many Children Have to Get Shot?’ (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, NY Times, 2-21-18) Along with moving videos showing the people who experienced the mass shooting in Florida there is one showing an NRA spokesman saying the Times and press are lying to you about the NRA. "Exposing mainstream media lies, etc." These are the messages gun control supporters must fight.) "We cannot protect our guns before we protect our children!" says one mother. "There is no better time than now to talk about gun control." Trump is shown arguing for "concealed carry" guns at schools--to scare off such shooters. He thinks more guns in the schools will make them safer, and wants some teachers armed with them. He found no support for that in Parkland.
• Expanding Civil Commitment Laws Is Bad Mental Health Policy (Morgan Shields, Ari Ne'eman, Health Affairs blog, 4-6-18) Expanding civil commitment and mental health institutionalization is a convenient tool for politicians seeking to deflect public pressure for gun control laws. But research has found that only 3 to 5.3 percent of violent crime is attributable to serious mental illness. And such measures would turn back the clock to a time when individuals could be hospitalized without their consent, even if they did not pose a danger to themselves or others.
• Wounds From Military-Style Rifles? ‘A Ghastly Thing to See’ (Gina Kolata and C.J. Chivers, NY Times, 3-4-18) Perhaps no one knows the devastating wounds inflicted by assault-style rifles better than the trauma surgeons who struggle to repair them. The doctors say they are haunted by their experiences confronting injuries so dire they struggle to find words to describe them. At a high school in Parkland, Fla., 17 people were recently killed with just such a weapon — a semiautomatic AR-15. It was legal there for Nikolas Cruz, 19, the suspect in the shooting, to buy a civilian version of the military’s standard rifle, while he would have had to be 21 to buy a less powerful and accurate handgun
• What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns (Heather Sher, The Atlantic, 2-22-18) They weren’t the first victims of a mass shooting the Florida radiologist had seen—but their wounds were radically different. "One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal....A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun....If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun shot injury. " It’s clear to me that AR-15 or other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet."
• In Parkland, journalism students take on role of reporter and survivor (lexandria Neason and Meg Dalton, Columbia Journalism Review, 2-21-18) "In the aftermath of mass shootings and other disasters, journalists working on deadline are inevitably criticized for parachuting into communities they don’t know and pushing microphones and notebooks into the faces of the grieving. But Ma, Nookala, and their classmates—already known and trusted as press on campus—have a unique advantage. They don’t have to imagine the position their subjects are in, because they’re in it, too. They’re reporters and survivors." “We tried to have as many pictures as possible to display the raw emotion that was in the classroom,” Ma says. “We were working really hard so that we could show the world what was going on and why we need change.”
• Emma Gonzalez, a senior who survived a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14, 2018, gave a blistering speech at an anti-gun rally on Saturday about the politicians complicit in the murder of her classmates.
"Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers nowadays, saying that all we are is self-involved and trend-obsessed, and hushing us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation? We are prepared to call BS!
Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA, telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this: We call BS!
They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence: We call BS!
They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun: We call BS!
They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars: We call BS!
They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred: We call BS!
That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works: We call BS!"
To which the crowd responded, Vote them out! Vote them out! Vote them out!
• Right-Wing Media Uses Parkland Shooting as Conspiracy Fodder (Michael M. Grynbaum, NY Times, 2-20-18) In certain right-wing corners of the web — and, increasingly, from more mainstream voices like Rush Limbaugh and a commentator on CNN — the students are being portrayed not as grief-ridden survivors but as pawns and conspiracists intent on exploiting a tragedy to undermine the nation’s laws.
• Mayors want to pass gun safety laws, but the NRA and our state legislatures won't let us (Andrew Gillum, Bill Peduto and Ted Wheeler, USA Today, 3-23-18) "Forty-three states have some form of gun preemption, a tactic increasingly used by state legislators to prevent cities and counties from making local laws and decisions. States are interfering in local efforts to raise wages, pass paid sick time and non-discrimination ordinances, and adopt fracking and environmental regulations. Lawmakers are using preemption to overturn elections, perpetuate racial and economic inequality, and silence local voices....And it’s happening because lobbyists and special interests know it’s easier to influence a few state lawmakers in 50 state capitols than thousands of local mayors and city councils.
• Companies that support the National Rifle Association (Drain the NRA, links to companies that some are boycotting for their sale of military style weapons to the public)
• With AR-15s, Mass Shooters Attack With the Rifle Firepower Typically Used by Infantry Troops (C. J. Chivers, Larry Buchanan, Denise Lu, and Karen Yourish, NY Times, 2-28-18) Since 2007, at least 173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s. The Parkland gunman, in practical terms, had the same rifle firepower as an American grunt using a standard infantry rifle in the standard way. Representative Brian Mast of Florida, a Republican and an Army combat veteran, has called for a ban on the sale of AR-15-style rifles. “The exact definition of assault weapon will need to be determined,” Mr. Mast said. “But we should all be able to agree that the civilian version of the very deadly weapon that the Army issued to me should certainly qualify.”
• After Orlando Shooting, ‘False Flag’ and ‘Crisis Actor’ Conspiracy Theories Surface (Christopher Mele, NY Times, 6-28-16) ' After the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., on June 12, Twitter brimmed with news reports of the carnage. But some posts on the massacre that claimed 49 lives also included a curious phrase: “false flag.” It was a code used by conspiracy theorists to signal their belief that the government had staged the massacre and the information the public was reading and hearing from the mainstream media was untrue.'
• Case Against Gun Control (James Fallows, First Drafts, Conversations, Stories in Progress, The Atlantic, Feb. 2018) Should the owner of a gun be subject to the same level of safety regulations as the owner/​pilot of a plane? Both can do extensive damage.)
• One Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School Shootings—And It’s Not About Guns (Glennon Doyle Melton, Reader's Digest, 2-16-18) "Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying."
• What Bullets Do to Bodies (Jason Fagone, Highline, HuffPost, 4-26-17) The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.
• Surgeon struggles to save boy's life in L.A.'s shooting season (Thomas Curwen, LA Times, 8-17-13) Why so many guns? It once was fistfights. It once was stabbings. Now it’s a whole new world."— Dr. Brant Putnam
• Precious Lives Project, in collaboration with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WUWM, WNOV, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. A two-year, 100-part radio series about young people and gun violence in Milwaukee. The stories give voice to many people not represented in mainstream media.
• The Uncounted (Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, NY Times Magazine, 11-16-17) An on-the-ground and award-winning investigation reveals that the U.S.-led battle against ISIS — hailed as the most precise air campaign in history — is killing far more Iraqi civilians than the coalition has acknowledged.
• Urban–Rural Differences in Suicide in the State of Maryland: The Role of Firearms (American Public Health Association, 4-13-17) Conclusions from a retrospective analysis: Suicide rates are higher in rural Maryland than in urban areas, driven by heavier rates of firearm suicides in men. Urban homicide rates from guns are higher than rural rates. Maryland is suited for this study because it is one of the few states to use appointed medical examiners exclusively, rather than elected coroners, who may not be forensic pathologists.
• What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer (Max Fisher and Josh Keller, NY Times, 11-7-17) Graphic showing this: The United States has 270 million guns and had 90 mass shooters from 1966 to 2012. No other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shooters. A thoughtful set of comparisons.
• Are Mass Murderers Insane? Usually Not, Researchers Say (Benedict Carey, NY Times, 11-8-17) "It is true that severe mental illnesses are found more often among mass murderers. About one in five are likely psychotic or delusional, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of 350 mass killers going back more than a century. The figure for the general public is closer to 1 percent. But the rest of these murderers do not have any severe, diagnosable disorder....Most mass murderers instead belong to a rogue’s gallery of the disgruntled and aggrieved, whose anger and intentions wax and wane over time, eventually curdling into violence in the wake of some perceived humiliation....“The majority of the killers were disgruntled workers or jilted lovers who were acting on a deep sense of injustice,” and not mentally ill, Dr. Stone said of his research....About two-thirds of this group had faced “long-term stress,” like trouble at school or keeping a job, failure in business, or disabling physical injuries from, say, a car accident. Substance abuse was also common: More than 40 percent had problems with alcohol, marijuana or other drugs....But other factors must be weighed. “In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” said Dr. Stone. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis — all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible.”
• The Mental Health System Can’t Stop Mass Shooters (Amy Barnhorst, OpEd, NY Times, 2-20-18) "But there are no reliable cures for insecurity, resentment, entitlement and hatred. The one concrete benefit of officially committing him would be that he could be prohibited from buying a gun from any federally licensed retailer. Of course, this would do nothing about any guns and ammunition he may already have amassed. Nor would it deter him from getting guns from private-party sales, which are exempt from background checks in many states."
• How to Stop Violence (Laura L. Hayes, Slate, 4-9-14) Anger management. Mentally ill people aren’t killers. Angry people are.
• Fighting for Gun Control 50 Years Ago (Mike Shatzkin, Medium, 2-21-18)
• Out Came the Girls: Adolescent Girlhood, the Occult, and the Slender Man Phenomenon (Alex Mar, Virginia Quarterly Review, October 2017). "Girls lured out into the dark woods—this is the stuff of folk tales from so many countries, a New World fear of the Puritans, an image at the heart of witchcraft and the occult, timeless. Some of our best-known folk tales were passed down by teenagers—specifically teenage girls....The common belief is that many of these tales, when told to children, serve as warnings for bad behavior, harsh lessons, morality plays. But on the flipside, they’re remarkable for their easy violence and malleable moral logic, like that of a child....Nearly a third of the original eighty-six tales of the Grimms’ collection feature young people, many of them girls, making their way into the woods—lured out by a trickster, or the need to pass a life-or-death test....To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood. A special alien, terrible and extraordinary....Like a fairy-tale monster, Slender Man emerged through a series of obscure clues, never fully visible. He first appeared online, in the summer of 2009, in two vague images that were quickly passed around horror and fantasy fan forums." A true horror story.
• Gun Violence Archive. Valuable in providing accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States. See, for example, page on Mass shootings.
• My son was shot at a sleepover (Jeff Truesdell, People, 11-13-17) Ashley Melton's son Noah was killed by a teen with an unsecured gun. A gun owner herself, she's trying to help other parents avoid a similar tragedy by keeping guns in a cabinet or drawer locked from children.
• Share These Gun Violence Numbers with Anyone Who Will Listen (Jack Holmes, Esquire, 10-2-17) Las Vegas is a symptom of a much larger disease. "It will happen again, because it happens most days. We have reached the 275th day of 2017. The horror that rained down on the Las Vegas strip Sunday night was the 273rd mass shooting of the year. It was the second mass shooting of the day on October 1, and the third of the weekend. It was the 11th mass shooting that week, since the previous Sunday, when there were four. There were two more that Saturday. Since September 2, 2017, there have been 29 mass shootings in America."
• Gun Violence by the Numbers (Everytown). On an average day, 98 Americans are killed with guns (on average, 7 children and teens). That's 12,000 gun deaths a year, average). For every person killed, two more are injured. 62% of firearm deaths are suicides. America's gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other developed countries. In an average month 50 women are shot to death by intimate partners in the U.S. In a domestic violence situation, women are five times more likely to be killed if there is a gun in the house. Black men are 14 times more likely than white men to be shot and killed by guns.
• If you beat your wife, you lose your gun. That’s how it should be. (Editorial, WashPost, 2-27-18) In criminal violence cases in Montgomery County, Maryland, guns were virtually never discussed. "Convicted abusers were not told that they, by law, were disqualified from possessing or purchasing firearms. They weren’t asked if they had any weapons. And — most alarming, given that the chances of a domestic violence victim being killed rise fivefold when an abuser has access to a gun — they weren’t told to surrender any guns." Three years ago legislation was introduced in Maryland that would plug the gap in state law by setting up a mechanism to facilitate the surrender of firearms by convicted domestic abusers, but the bill died, two years running. It's back again. "Hopefully, the attention focused on gun control that resulted from the recent tragic events in Florida will help win passage of this needed fix."
• The True Cost of Gun Violence in America (Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West, Mother Jones, 4-15-15) The data the NRA doesn’t want you to see.
• Treating Domestic Violence as a Medical Problem (Anna Gorman, Kaiser Health News, 1-29-18) A growing number of health providers and anti-abuse agencies in California and around the country are collaborating to identify victims and get them help. More doctors now screen their patients for signs of abuse and more agencies place victims’ advocates inside health centers. Education and counseling for people experiencing violence is also more widely available in clinics and hospitals. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends doctors routinely question women about violence in the home and refer them to services if needed. The task force concluded in 2013 that intervention could reduce violence and abuse as well as mental and physical health problems.
• If Newtown Wasn't Enough, Why Would Las Vegas Be Enough? (Charles P Pierce, Esquire, 10-2-17) Our leaders are afraid to tolerate limits on Second Amendment "freedoms."
• How to Prevent Gun Deaths? Where Experts and the Public Agree (Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz, The Upshot, NY Times, 1-10-17) Must-read on the subject.
• The NRA has blocked gun violence research for 20 years. Let's end its stranglehold on science. (Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 6-14-16)
• Gun violence research: History of the federal funding freeze (Christine Jamieson, American Psychological Association, Feb. 2013) "n 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published an article by Arthur Kellerman and colleagues, “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home,” which presented the results of research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The study found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide. The article concluded that rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance...the National Rifle Association (NRA) responded by campaigning for the elimination of the center that had funded the study, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. The center itself survived, but Congress included language in the 1996 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill (PDF, 2.4MB) for Fiscal Year 1997 that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
• The NIH Is Finding Ways to Tip-Toe Around Congress’s Restrictions on Gun Violence Research (Miles Kohrman and Kate Masters, The Trace, 4-7-16) The divergent paths followed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — both subject to the same congressional directive seen as trying to prevent all gun research — is attracting new attention as health researchers and other critics have put new pressure on the CDC to change its practices....In 1997, Congress took $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount the agency had dedicated to studying gun violence in the previous year.
• 1 in 4 handgun owners carry loaded weapons monthly (Denise-Marie Ordway, Journalist's Resource, 1-26-18) The researchers estimate that 9 million of the approximately 38 million adult handgun owners in the United States carry a loaded handgun with them monthly. Of those who carry loaded weapons, 3 million do it every day. Of those who carried loaded handguns, about two-thirds reported always carrying them concealed while 1 in 10 reported always carrying them openly.
• CDC: Half Of All Female Homicide Victims Are Killed By Intimate Partners (Camila Domonoske, The Two-Way, WAMU, NPR, 7-21-17) This is a public health problem. "We found that approximately one in 10 victims of intimate-partner-violence-related homicide experienced some form of violence in the preceding month," Petrosky says. "...So this indicates that there could have been potentially an opportunity for intervention for those women." The report also analyzed the method of homicide — more than half involved firearms and 20 percent involved some sort of blade.
• The True Cost of Gun Violence in America (Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West, Mother Jones, 4-15-15) The data the NRA doesn’t want you to see. Nobody, save perhaps for the hardcore gun lobby, doubts that gun violence is a serious problem. And solving a crisis, as any expert will tell you, begins with data. But the government has mostly been mute on the economic toll of gun violence. Why the lack of solid data? A prime reason is that the National Rifle Association and other influential gun rights advocates have long pressured political leaders to shut down research related to firearms. A top public health expert describes the chill this way: “Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”
• US Mass Shootings, 1982-2017: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation (Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen and Deanna Pan, Mother Jones, updated 10-2-17) The full data set from our in-depth investigation into mass shootings.
• Restricting Research On Gun Violence (Michael Halpern on Kojo Nnandi show, 1-16-13) The headlines and debate will likely focus on the gun control measures including criminal background checks for all gun sales and reinstating an assault weapons ban but there's also call to lift restriction on federally funded research into gun violence. What restrictions you might ask? There is, for example, a law prohibiting the National Institutes of Health from spending to advocate or promote gun control. Congress, over the past two decades, has restricted federal funds from being used to “promote or advocate gun control,” which many researchers say has had a chilling effect on studies related to gun violence. Even the new health care law includes a provision preventing doctors from asking patients about guns in the home.
• Congress must act to make America safer from gun violence (Americans for Responsible Solutions). Stand with Gabby Giffords. Sign this petition to Congress to make our communities safer from gun violence by taking action to make it harder for criminals, terrorists, and the dangerously mentally ill to get their hands on guns.
• You Will Not Have My Hate by Antoine Leiris. "A year after his wife Hélene was killed in the Bataclan Theatre terrorist attacks in Paris, Antoine Leiris wrote this small, powerful book. She was the love of his life, the mother of their son, and their lives will never be the same. Leiris' decision not to hate those whose actions were ignited by hate, may appear to be saintly--it is not. This is a meditation on the consequences of hate, and how one man has chosen to deal with the aftermath on a daily, and probably eternal way."--Los Angeles Public Library
• Why Can’t We Talk About Guns? (1a radio,7-13-17) An NRA video making the rounds online has been called everything from an open call to violence to protect white supremacy to a condemnation of violence. The debate over guns in America has never been easy – but is it getting harder to keep it civil and useful?
• National Association of Crime Victim Compensation Boards (NACVCB) Crime victim compensation programs in states across the country help victims of violence every day, paying for the costs of medical care, mental health counseling, and lost time at work, as well as funerals and other expenses that families face in the aftermath of homicide.
• States with the most gun violence (Thomas C. Frohlich, USA Today, 6-15-15). Watch the video.
• From San Ysidro to Sandy Hook: Surviving, but never getting over it (Joe Mozingo and Thomas Curwen, LA Times, 6-19-16)
• Precious Lives , a two-year, 100-part radio series about young people and gun violence in Milwaukee. All episodes can be downloaded, and are intended to be used in outreach and engagement. “Because we were committed to revisiting it every week, we could revisit people,” Emily Forman, a former producer on Precious Lives, told Nieman Reports. “We could go from talking to a family to the beat cop to the faith leader. You could draw connections between people, even in completely different parts of the city, so you could see how people knew each other and that violence isn’t discrete. It radiates.”
• What Bullets Do to Bodies (Jason Fagone, Highline, HuffPost, 4-26-17) The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.
• Two-thirds of Americans are OK with doctors talking with them about gun safety (Susan Perry, Minneapolis Post, 7-27-16)
• A Drumbeat of Multiple Shootings, but America Isn’t Listening (Sharon LaFraniere, Daniela Porat, and Agustin Armendariz, NY Times, 5-22-16) Seven people were shot in a matter of minutes last August at an Elks Lodge in Cincinnati. Most shootings with four deaths or injuries are invisible outside their communities. And most of the lives they scar are black.
• Mass Shootings Still Happen All The Time, So Why Does The Press Look Away? (Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, 3-31-17)
• After a mass shooting: A survivor’s life (Eli Saslow, Washington Post, 12-5-15) Another mass shooting was over. The country had moved on. But inside one house in Oregon, a family was discovering the unending extent of a wound. ““his auburn hair curling at the ears, his front teeth sacrificed to a soccer collision, his arms wrapped around Ninja Cat, the stuffed animal that had traveled with him everywhere, including into the hearse and underground....The fact was it felt good to be angry, to yell and curse, because if she wasn’t angry then she was mostly afraid: of nightmares, of being alone, of the shadows in the church parking lot across the street, of cars backfiring, of the sound of knocking coming now at the door.”
• What to Do With the Tributes After the Shooting Stops (Alan Blinder, NY Times, 7-7-17)
• An Experiment in Empathy (Lisa Miller, New York, 12-26-16) “We change the world when we walk in one another’s shoes: this idea of radical empathy,” said Colum McCann, president of Narrative 4. “We don’t do direct conflict resolution. People understand one another by walking inside the language and inside the story of somebody else’s experience.” In one such activity, covered in this New York magazine story, "He auctioned off the pistol that killed Trayvon Martin. She watched her child die in a mass shooting. Can they change each other’s minds about guns?"
• Five Dallas Officers Were Killed as Payback, Police Chief Says (Manny Fernandez, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Jonah Engel, NY Times, 7-9-17) See also How the Attack on the Dallas Police Unfolded
• Officer Down Memorial Page
• Everytown (fighting back against the NRA and their dangerous agenda)
• Americans for Responsible Solutions. Take Gabby's pledge: “I promise you that if we cannot make our communities safer from gun violence while protecting gun rights with the Congress we have now, I will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s.”
• Armed with Facts (mostly debunking John Lott, the NRA's "gun academic."
• GunPolicy.org Armed violence and gun laws, country by country-- intelligence from a broad range of official and academic sources. This university site is for researchers, officials, journalists and advocates who need accurate citations and rapid access to credible sources. (No longer updated, for lack of funding.)
"In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries (23.2 injuries per 100,000 U.S. citizens), and 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms" (10.6 deaths per 100,000 U.S. citizens). ... In 2012, 64% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides." ~Gun violence in the United States (Wikipedia entry, with links to many more, relevant articles and sites)
• Homicide Outreach Project Empowering Survivors (HOPES program), William Wendt Center for Loss and Healing, Washington DC
• Mothers in Charge Stop the Violence! Prevention, Education, and Intervention
• Women Against Gun Violence
• Violent Death Bereavement Society
• Victim Support Services (VSS)
• National Center for Victims of Crime
• Violent Loss Resources (Survivors of Violent Loss Network)
• Center for Complicated Grief ("Grief is a form of love.")
• Domestic Violence Forums And Chats (DomesticShelters.org)
• Domestic Violence forum (My PTSD
• Key Gun Violence Statistics (Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence)
• After a toddler accidentally shot and killed his older sister, a family’s wounds run deep (Terrence McCoy, Washington Post, 12-1-16) See also “A mass shooting, only in slow motion” (Glenn Jeffers, Nieman Reports, Newsrooms are moving away from a focus on mass shootings to tell more nuanced stories about the people and communities marred by gun violence. Kimi Reylander, 9, was shot and killed while visiting her great-grandfather’s home in Irondale, Alabama, a small town just east of Birmingham. The culprit? Her brother Jaxon, then 3, who found a loaded handgun in a nearby bedroom and fired it.
• Gun Violence in America: The 13 Key Questions (With 13 Concise Answers) Jonathan Stray, The Atlantic, 2-4-13)
• A Brief History of Guns in America: Guns and Public Health Part 1 (Aaron Carroll, Healthcare Triage, The Incidental Economist, 8-7-17) See also Homicide and Firearms – Guns and Public Health Part 2 (Healthcare Triage, The Incidental Economist, 8-14-17); Guns and Public Health, Part 3 (8-21-17). And What Kind of Gun Laws Work? Guns and Public Health Part 4
• The U.S. Tested 67 Nuclear Bombs in Their Country. Now They’re Dying in Oklahoma. (Zoë Carpenter and Sarah Craig, Narratively, 7-17-17) In 1954, the Congress of the Marshall Islands requested a halt to the testing, which the U.S. rejected on the grounds that the islanders “had no medical reason to expect any permanent after-effects on the general health of the inhabitants.” After a series of military experiments devastated their homeland, Marshall Islands residents were permitted to immigrate to the U.S. But they didn’t know their American dream came with a catch.
"It may well be that the magical formula for a balanced, conscious, and responsible society is gender equality in the arts of nurturing and governing." ~ Jane Evershed

“The voice of intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.” ~ psychiatrist Karl Menninger

“There is no suffering greater than that which drives people to suicide, suicide defines the moment in which mental pain exceeds the human capacity to bear it. It represents the abandonment of hope.” ~ John T. Maltsberger
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, seek help. Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
• American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Walk to save lives: Out of the Darkness Walks
• Suicide Awareness and Prevention (Wristband Resources)
• International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) Go here to find suicide crisis centers throughout the world.
• Suicide Awareness: Voices of Education (SAVE)
• Suicide and Depression Awareness for Students (LearnPsychology) People contemplating suicide or experiencing the depths of a severe depression need to know they are not alone. From teenagers to college students, LGBT to the elderly, people struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts need options, reassurance, hope and help.
• Suicide Is Preventable. Pain isn't always obvious. Know the signs.
• Suicide Prevention (U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs). See Progress and Hope on Preventing Veteran Suicides (Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, Letter to the Editor, NY Times, 2-17-15)
• Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC)
• Suicide Prevention, as part of Violence Prevention (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• What I’ve learned from 547 doctor suicides (Pamela Wible, KevinMD, 10-31-17)
• When doctors commit suicide, it’s often hushed up (Pamela Wible, Washington Post, 7-14-14) There are internal links to many other articles, and to Physician Suicide Letters Answered (her free audiobook). See also Physician Suicide.
• Aaron Hernandez’s Suicide Highlights a Huge Gap in Correctional Health (Jeremy Samuel Faust, Slate, 4-20-17) Death by suicide, like former NFL star and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez’s, is common. In state and federal prisons, 5.5 percent of deaths result from suicide. This is far more than any other cause of violence carried out by other detainees or even correctional officers, and it’s far higher than the number of deaths that result from suicide in the general population (1.6 percent)... Researchers Fatos Kaba, Homer Venters, and their colleagues at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene discovered several features that were correlated with increased risk of self-harm by inmates. Among the strongest predictors of self-harm were solitary confinement, serious mental illness, youth (age 18 or younger), and being of Latino or Caucasian race.
• Freedom, Finally, After a Life in Prison (Amy Linn, NY Times Sunday Review, 8-21-15)
• New Research Shows Suicides Spiked Following Robin Williams’ Death (Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Mother Jones, 2-7-18) “You don’t know who out there is vulnerable. You don’t know how they’re going to read those headlines.”“Once they see somebody else that they relate to that is able to take that action, it becomes feasible in a way…That’s why it’s a similar age group, a similar sex, a similar method.” See World Health Organization do-and-don't guidelines on reporting on suicide: What not to write and what to write instead.
• Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection (Julie Scelfo, NY Times, 7-27-15) See also Answers About Campus Depression and Suicide Risk Among College Students
• Most big public colleges don’t track suicides, AP finds (Collin Binkley, AP, 1-2-18) An AP investigation finds that the nation's largest universities don't track student suicides, despite evidence that rates of anxiety and depression may be rising among college students. Many schools "have increased spending on mental health services to counter what the American Psychological Association and other groups have called a mental health crisis on campuses." Mental health advocates in several states are pushing to require universities to collect suicide data. If the statistics become public, some schools fear it could damage their reputations. Schools that do track suicides, however, often use their data to refine prevention efforts.
• Semester-long waitlist for mental health help at college where student killed himself (Joe Brandt, NJ.com, 12-17-17) A student suicide on Rowan University's campus is leading to calls for improved mental health services at the institution, as the community mourns. The incident was enough to get students talking, especially on social media, about experiences where they felt scared, depressed, stressed -- and then the difficulties in getting counseling.
• Widening Rural-Urban Disparities in Youth Suicides, United States, 1996-2010 (Cynthia A. Fontanella et al., HHS Public Access, NCBI, NIH, from JAMA Pediatric) "Suicide rates for adolescents and young adults are higher in rural than in urban communities regardless of the method used, and rural-urban disparities appear to be increasing over time....For youths between the ages of 10 and 24 years, suicide was the third leading cause of death in 2010 behind only unintentional injuries and homicide. Males are at higher risk, accounting for 81% of suicide deaths in the 10- to 24-year age group. Suicide risk increases with age...Across the study period from 1996 to 2010, suicide rates for youths in rural areas of the United States were approximately double those in urban areas for both males and females. " Among possible explanations: the limited availability and accessibility of mental health services in rural areas--and rural primary care physicians often feel inadequate and unprepared to diagnosis or treat mental illness. Moreover, males are four times as likely as females to complete suicide (peaking in the 15-25 age group) and young men in that age group "may be reluctant to use services because of the stigma associated with mental illness and the lack of anonymity in a rural environment. Rural residents may tend to value self-reliance and individualism, distrust governmental authority, and view help-seeking more negatively than urban residents."
• Schools Turn To Software For Suicide Prevention — But Not Everyone's On Board (Anya Kamenetz, All Things Considered, 3-28-16) Many schools in the U.S. already use a software tool (GoGuardian) to block certain websites. Now, they're implementing that same tool to prevent suicide — the second leading cause of death among youth. Touted as a life saver for some students who displayed suicidal tendencies, it does raise concerns about privacy and such potential problems as the outing of (for example) gay students or students searching for information about sexually transmitted diseases.
• Suicide of teen who made sex video shows dilemma for schools (Michael Tarm and Martha Irvine, Seattle Times, 9-12-17) "Staff at a suburban Chicago high school called 16-year-old Corey Walgren to the dean’s office to ask about a video he made of himself having sex with a classmate. A few hours later, the teen walked to the top of a five-story parking deck and jumped....The issue also raises a high-stakes legal question because many child porn laws predate the phenomena of teens sharing sexual images by cellphone. And neither they nor their parents usually have any idea that doing so can trigger serious penalties, including being labeled a sex offender for life....Critics say child pornography laws should not be invoked to prosecute kids who share sexual images with other kids. When those laws were passed, lawmakers could not have foreseen how teens, perhaps acting on impulse or under peer pressure, would be able to create or send explicit images at the push of a button. The laws were aimed at protecting children from adults. Critics say it’s a misapplication to use them to prosecute children."
• Suicide – A Preventable Tragedy (SAMHSA)
• It’s not pain but ‘existential distress’ that leads people to assisted suicide, study suggests (Ariana Eunjung Cha, WaPo, 5-26-17)
• Chris Cornell: When Suicide Doesn’t Make Sense (Julie A. Fast, HuffPost, ) "You may read about Chris Cornell and ask yourself, 'How could someone who is married with three beautiful children, in one of the biggest bands in the world, who had literally just finished an incredibly successful live show go to his room and kill himself?' If he has a brain like mine, he has an illness and his brain was triggered by something that resulted in a suicidal episode. It may have had nothing to do with his amazing life. Sometimes an illness is simply stronger than the person. Sometimes medications mess with our sensitive brain chemicals. ...My mood disorder comes with suicidal depression. It gets triggered. I don’t have to be down or upset. It just happens when it gets triggered....Not everyone has a plan to counteract chemical suicidal thoughts, but I do."
• The Suicide Paradox (Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics radio, 6-29-16, listen online free). There are more than twice as many suicides as murders in the U.S., but suicide attracts far less scrutiny. Freakonomics Radio digs through the numbers and finds all kinds of surprises.
• Preventing Teen Suicide: What the Evidence Shows (Aaron E. Carroll, New York Times, 8-17-17)
• U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High (SabrinaTarvernise, NY Times, 4-22-17)
• Doctor revived after suicide tells all (posted by Pamela Wible, Kevin MD, 2-18-17) ER doctor 'Michael' who barely survived his suicide attempt shares insights into why he tried and recommends common steps to prevent more suicides: "I was as happy as I had ever been in my personal life. My decision to end it all was 100 percent work related....There’s a saying we have in the emergency room when we witness trauma and death among the innocent: 'A little piece of my soul died.; We’re never offered counseling, and in the end, you get the jaded emergency doctor who struggles to care. My psychologist says it wasn’t just the last girl. It was trauma after trauma after trauma."
• A Suicide Therapist’s Secret Past (Stacy Freedenthal, NY Times, 5-11-17). She created the website Speaking of Suicide.
• Patient Suicide Brings Therapists Lasting Pain (Erica Goode, NY Times, 1-16-01). Related to that: Essential Papers on Suicide, ed. by John T. Maltsberger and Mark Goldblatt. Why do people take their own lives? How can clinicians best plan and carry out intelligent treatment of desperate patients who are giving up on themselves?
• Speaking of Suicide: Steve Stephens and Responsible Reporting (Pauline Campos, The Fix, 4-25-17) "The Foundation for Suicide Prevention recommends responsible reporting of suicide to prevent "suicide contagion” - copycat suicides or suicide clusters - a proven phenomenon in which at risk individuals can be triggered to act by reading or watching a news story in which certain factors -- such as mention of method and glamorizing or sensationalizing death -- are present in the coverage. News stories with dramatic/​graphic headlines, or images, also can lead to contagion suicide."
• Think about the words you use when covering suicide (Andrew Lowndes, AHCJ, Covering Health, 4-25-14). Journalists: Say died by suicide, or death by suicide because ‘committed suicide' stigmatizes families where suicide has occurred. You don’t say ‘committed’ cancer.
• Suicidal Impulses Don’t Have to Be Deadly (Maia Szalavitz Time, 3-28-14) "Although nearly 40,000 Americans die from suicide every year—a death toll similar to that from unintentional overdose and car accidents—most suicide attempts that are foiled are not repeated. The majority of suicides are committed on impulse....This is why guns are strongly linked to suicide: they make the odds that a passing impulse will be deadly much higher, and account for nearly half of all suicide deaths....The link to impulsivity may be one reason that suicidal thinking is relatively common but suicide itself is far more rare, and predicting who is at highest risk is difficult." Safety nets, which will go up around San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, are a proven lifesaver
• Suicide Prevention (SAMHSA) A list of organizations, links, articles, and other resources for suicide prevention (somewhat Native American oriented)
• Primo Levi’s Unlikely Suicide Haunts His Lasting Work (Adam Kirsch, Tablet, 9-21-15) A monumental new edition of the Auschwitz survivor’s complete writings shows a humanist laboring in the dark.
• Suicidal Thoughts: The Creative Lives and Tragic Deaths of a Prince and a Pauper (Nancy Spiller, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12-30-14) A must-read article.
• Why doctors kill themselves (Pamela Wible, Kevin MD, 3-23-16) Snippets: "Across the country, our doctors are jumping from hospital rooftops, overdosing in call rooms, found hanging in hospital chapels. It’s medicine’s dirty secret. And it’s covered up by our hospitals, clinics, and medical schools....doctors describe med school as “a soul-crushing boot camp, a dehumanizing nightmare, my own personal Vietnam.” Medical training is neither motherly nor kind....Sleep deprivation is a torture technique. Fear as a teaching tool... It’s not costly or complicated to stop bullying, hazing, and abuse. It’s been outlawed from elementary schools to fraternities. Why not health care? ...Medical culture and education must change."
• Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Read this interesting review of and story about the book by Temma Ehrenfeld (The Humanist, 4-22-14).
• miTowns Face Rising Suicide Rates (Laura Beil, NY Times, 11-3-15) "Rural adolescents commit suicide at roughly twice the rate of their urban peers.... the realities of small-town life can take an outsize toll on the vulnerable. A combination of lower incomes, greater isolation, family issues and health problems can lead people to be consumed by day-to-day struggles..." A spouse's "sense of self-sufficiency combined with a fear of stigma" can keep him from treatment. So can a lack of privacy.
• The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (Kimberly A. Van Orden, et al., Psychol Rev. 2010 Apr; 117(2): 575–600. doi: 10.1037/​a0018697). The authors propose that the most dangerous form of suicidal desire is caused by the simultaneous presence of two interpersonal constructs—thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness (and hopelessness about these states)—and further, that the capability to engage in suicidal behavior is separate from the desire to engage in suicidal behavior.
• The dangerously contagious effect of assisted-suicide laws (Aaron Kheriaty, WaPo, 11-20-15) "...British scholars David Jones and David Paton demonstrating that legalizing assisted suicide in other states has led to a rise in overall suicide rates — assisted and unassisted — in those states....after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic factors and other state-specific issues, physician-assisted suicide is associated with a 6.3 percent increase in total suicide rates. These effects are greater for individuals older than 65 (for whom the associated increase was 14.5 percent)." Helping people who are suicidal "find strategies that help them to cope with adversity is associated with decreased suicide rates."
• Why we choose suicide (Mark Henick, TEDxToronto, 10-1-13) Video of a 15-minute talk.
• Notes From My Suicide (Kenneth R. Rosen, The Big Roundtable, 3-10-16)
• David Sedaris Talks About Surviving the Suicide of a Sibling (Blake Bailey, Vice, 6-1-15)
• Biology of Suicide (NPR, audio and transcript, part of its End of Life series: Exploring Death in America)
• By My Own Hand by Anita Darcel Taylor (Bellevue Literary Review). Taylor writes that for those who go through the hell of manic depression, suicide is simply a tool to end great pain -- an "earned choice."
• How old-fashioned, pen-to-paper letters could help pull people back from the brink of suicide (Jenny Chen, WaPo. 4-7-16)
• Finding a Bed in Bedlam (Jo Marie Reilley, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, 5-8-15)
• The Dying of the Whites (Ross Douthat, OpEd, NY Times, 11-7-15) "[T}he mortality rate for minorities in the U.S. continued to fall between 1999 and 2013, mirroring the trend in Europe, and the African-American death rate in particular fell hugely. [Though it was still high.] Amid the stresses of the dot-com bust and the Great Recession, it was only white Americans who turned increasingly to drugs, liquor and quietus....Noting that religious practice has fallen faster recently among less-educated whites than among less-educated blacks and Hispanics, their paper argues that white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility. But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense....Maybe sustained growth, full employment and a welfare state that’s friendlier to work and family can help revive that nexus. Or maybe working-class white America needs to adapt culturally, in various ways, to this era of relative stagnation, and learn from the resilience of communities that are used to struggling in the shadow of elite neglect."
• The missing context behind the widely cited statistic that there are 22 veteran suicides a day (Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post, 2-4-16) "The actual number of veteran suicides a day might be higher than 22 for a given population of veterans facing certain risk factors, and lower for another group. The repeated use of this number has been magnified by the lack of comprehensive research, but that does not make it acceptable to repeat an alarming figure with no context or caveats — especially one that researchers cautioned against repeatedly in the study. The more important issue is whether the rate of suicides among veterans is higher than among the general population–and if so, by how much. That would be a better statistic to use than a raw number with little context or meaning."
• Suicide rates for black children twice that of white children, new data show (Amy Ellis Nutt, WashPost, 5-21-18) "African American children are taking their lives at roughly twice the rate of their white counterparts, according to a new study that shows a widening gap between the two groups. The 2001-2015 data, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, confirm a pattern first identified several years ago when researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio found that the rate of suicides for black children ages 5 to 12 exceeded that of young whites. The results were seen in both boys and girls."
• Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves (David Wong, Cracked, 8-11-14) but see also:
• 'It Was Not Depression That Killed Robin' (Kara Warner, People, 11-4-15) "It was not depression that killed Robin," Susan says, speaking to the public perception of what drove Williams to commit suicide. "Depression was one of let's call it 50 symptoms and it was a small one." "Frequently misdiagnosed, DLB is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer's and causes fluctuations in mental status, hallucinations and impairment of motor function. The disease started taking its toll on Williams in the last year before his death, by way of its "whack-a-mole"-like symptoms which included heightened levels of anxiety, delusions and impaired movement." It took more than a year to arrive at a diagnosis of diffuse Lewy body dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). See also Robin Williams’s Widow Points to Dementia as a Suicide Cause (Dave Itzkoff and Benedict Carey, NY Times, 11-3-15) and The Death of Robin Williams, And What Suicide Isn't (Elizabeth.Hawksworth, BlogHer, 8-14-14)
• How a Marine Unit’s High Suicide Rate Got That Way (Dave Phillips, NY Times, 10-29-15)
• In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another (Dave Phillips, NY Times, 9-19-15)Members of a Marine battalion that served in a restive region in Afghanistan have been devastated by the deaths of comrades and frustrated by the V.A.
• More White People Die From Suicide and Substance Abuse: Why? (Gina Kolata, NY Times, 11-3-15) What’s interesting, Dr. Case said, is that the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks....“We don’t know which came first, were the drugs pushed so much that people are hypersensitive to pain or does overprescription of the drugs make pain worse?” Dr. Case said. See also Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds (Gina Kolata, NY Times, 11-2-15)
• Teenagers, Medication and Suicide Richard A. Friedman, NY Times, 8-3-15). Parents should not be afraid of prescriptions for antidepressants for their teenagers. By preventing depression, they probably save, rather than risk, lives.
• Daniel, 1988-2000: A child's suicide, unending grief and lessons learned (Sara Fritz, St. Petersburg Times, 11-16-03)
• The Two Suicides that Changed My Life (Beth Duckles, Narratively) A moving personal story that may help you see others' suicide in a new light.
How witnessing a shocking suicide on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—and talking the dead man’s father through his grief—helped me understand my mother and the lifelong pain she has lived with.
• The View from Vista Bridge (Christen McCurdy, Narratively). Portland is known as the city of bridges—but it’s also a capital of suicides. After losing a close friend who jumped, I needed to find out why.
• Oregon Father’s Memorial Trek Across Country Ends in a Family’s Second Tragedy (Jack Healy, NY Times, 10-15-13) Joe Bell was walking across the country to tell the story of his gay son, Jadin, 15, who killed himself after being bullied.
• Prayers for Bobby: A Mother's Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son by Leroy Aarons. Mary Griffith persuaded her son Bobby to pray that God would cure him, but the church's hatred of homosexuality and the obvious pain his gayness was causing his family led him increasingly to loathe himself. After his suicide, her anguish led her on a journey from faithful churchgoer to national crusader for gay and lesbian youth. Read this story about her and Stephanie Reed, for a few of how parents feel after such a suicide, and what they often do about it.
• Decades after 2 suicide attempts, I'm thankful to have the life I nearly cut short (Jacquielynn Floyd Dallas News.com, 2-2-13). "For me, depression took on a camouflaged veneer of normal that made it difficult to “read the signals.” "What I suffered from was real. It was also temporary and entirely treatable."
• Murder-suicide disturbing trend among the elderly (Diana Reese, Washington Post, 1-26-13). "The typical case? A depressed, controlling husband who shoots his ailing wife — without her permission, according to Cohen. . . . Experts say depression, exhaustion and isolation all play a role; often, it’s men who are thrust into the unfamiliar role of caregiver. They may suffer from undiagnosed clinical depression. And if they learn their own health problems put them at risk of dying before their spouses, they may believe that no one else can take care of their wives as well as they can."
• Complicated Grief in Survivors of Suicide Loss (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention). Watch free video of webinar on subject.
• Copycat suicide (Wikipedia entry)
• Bible passages dealing with suicide (Religious.tolerance.org)
• Families of Military Suicides Seek White House Condolences (James DAO, NYTimes, 11-25-09, on pressure to change a hurtful policy)
• My big sister took her own life (Ali Grant, Globe & Mail, 4-8-10). "Suicide. My beautiful big sister, Isobel. Dead by her own hands at 62. Literally the unthinkable happening. My mind was unable to allow for the possibility that she would kill herself, in spite of the daily conversations we had, in spite of my knowing that she was struggling with pain, both physical and psychological. "
• On Suicide And why we should talk more about it (Clancy Martin, Ars Philosopha, Harpers Magazine, 6-25-13).
• Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals (PDF, World Health Organization)
• Religion and Suicide (Betty Rollin hosts discussion for Religion & Ethics Weekly--listen or read transcript)
• Remembering Denny (Calvin Trillin writes about the life and unfulfilled potential of his Yale classmate and former close friend Roger "Denny" Hansen, a Rhodes scholar, academic, and State Department employee whose great promise ended in middle age with his suicide)
• Reporting on Suicide website. Download PDF of Recommendations for Reporting on Suicide (PDF, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention)
• Sad End to a Long, Slow Slide (Corey Kilgannon, New York Times Regional edition 8-12-07), a loving couple dies together
• SAVE (Suicide Awareness, Voices of Education), suicide prevention
• Suicide and the Media (New Zealand Ministry of Health, tips on media coverage to reduce risk of encouraging suicide in at-risk individuals)
• Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop (CDC)
• The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham. "Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index—that most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history—marriage, parents, business failures—and every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father."
• Media and the hard truth about suicides (Stephen J.A. Ward, Center for Journalism Ethics, 9-24-11) "The guiding principle should be: publish uncomfortable facts where such information is necessary for a clear public understanding of the event and to indicate what social responses might be necessary."
• Suicide Notes (Liam Casey, Ryerson Review of Journalism 12-22-10). "I contemplated killing myself five years ago. Now, to help others, I call on all journalists to break the silence on our final taboo."
• 40 celebrities who committed suicide (The Daily Heel). This slide show is a vehicle for drawing you to ads, but as you click through, the brief copy for many suggests how much work we have to do in suicide prevention. Here is copy for #7, for example: "Jovan Belcher- age 25. In December 2012, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his longtime girlfriend Kassandra Perkins nine times in front of his mother before driving to the Chief’s practice facility where he shot and killed himself in front of his coach and general manager. Right before Belcher shot himself, he said, “I wasn’t able to get enough help.” An autopsy found that he was suffering from CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), caused by repeated head traumas playing American football which causes memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression. The killings also orphaned Belcher’s three-month old baby daughter, Zoey.
• The search for sensitive coverage of the tragedy of suicide: An Australian story (Leo Bowman, Center for Journalism Ethics, 4-17-13)
• Suicide Prevention (many useful resources from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC)
• Primary prevention of suicide and suicidal behaviour for adolescents in school settings (Cochrane review)
• Suicide Prevention (National Institute of Mental Health)
• Mice and Mothers by Nathalia Holt (partly about her mother's suicide). Too many deaths have no meaning. I needed these animals' lives to be part of the fight against H.I.V.
“Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.” ~ Albert Schweitzer

“The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.” ~ Kay Redfield Jamison
"When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understanding, wisdom, and depth of remorse foisted on them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness." ~attributed to Yasunari Kawabata by Howard Norman, in the fifth section of his excellent memoir I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“Few understand that the death [suicide] is seldom self-determined, but rather driven by a distortion of perception by a biochemical effect…People who die by suicide do not want to die; they simply want to end the pain…” ~ Andrew Slaby

• Taking Chance Home (Marine Lieutenant Colonel Strobl's simple and moving account of escorting the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps home from Dover Air Force Base). You can watch HBO's film based on the story, Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon.
• TAPS (Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors)
• Three Little Words . Roy Peter Clark's memorable series in the St. Petersburg Times, "a tale of trust, betrayal and redemption," and AIDS, which "challenges us to reconsider our thoughts about marriage, privacy, public health and sexual identity"
• UNITE (grief support after miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant death)
• What Broke My Father's Heart by Katy Butler (NY Times Magazine, 6-18-10). How putting in a pacemaker wrecked a family's life. Katy Butler's father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. She writes, of her parents: "I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims." You may also want to read Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
• What Comes After by Lisa Mundy (Washington Post Magazine). They lost their daughter in the deadliest campus massacre in U.S. history. One parent wants to file a lawsuit. The other doesn't.
• What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief (Coburn Dukehart, NPR, The Picture Show, 1-28-13)
• When Treating Cancer Is Not an Option (Jane E. Brody, Well, NY Times, 11-12-12). An excellent discussion of how doctors need to communicate with patients who are terminally ill (and check to see if their communications got through). Telling patients to plan for the worst but hope for the best gives them "better outcomes — less depression and less distress, and they’re more likely to die comfortably at home.”
• Why Didn't They Stop Him? (When Domestic Violence Laws Don't Work, by Phoebe Zerwick, O, the Oprah Magazine, August 2009)
• Recommended reading

Complex and Difficult Endings: A Reading List

• Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (about the sense of "frozen grief" that can occur when a loved one is perceived as physically absent but mentally present (because of desertion, divorce, or abduction, or because missing in actions) or physically present but mentally or psychologically absent (because of dementia, mental illness, or other forms of mental or emotional loss or injury).

• Butler, Katy. Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. Against this backdrop of familial love, wrenching moral choices, and redemption, Knocking on Heaven’s Door celebrates the inventors of the 1950s who cobbled together lifesaving machines like the pacemaker—and it exposes the tangled marriage of technology, medicine, and commerce that gave us a modern way of death: more painful, expensive, and prolonged than ever before. A riveting exploration of the forgotten art of dying, Knocking on Heaven’s Door empowers readers to create new rites of passage to the “Good Deaths” our ancestors so prized. Like Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death and How We Die by Sherwin Nuland, it is sure to cause controversy and open minds.

• Harrison, Lindsay. Missing. During her sophomore year at Brown University, Lindsay's brother called to say her mother was missing. Forty days later they discovered the unthinkable: Their mother’s body had been found in the ocean. A page-turning account of those first forty days (dealings with detectives, false sightings, wild hope, and deep despair), then her search for solace as she tries to understand who her mother truly was, makes peace with her grief, and becomes closer to her father and brothers as her mother’s death forces her to learn more about her mother than she ever knew before.

• Nuland, Sherwin B. How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (superb explanations of the actual physical processes of dying and good on why and when to stop trying to rescue the terminally ill and to let them die peacefully and in less pain and discomfort, written after Nuland realized that his physician's impulse to "rescue" prolonged the suffering of his older brother and other patients)

"Although I’m not ready to admit it, my father is dying. As cancer takes over his body, we sit together – talking, enjoying the garden, and watching old movies. I’m trying to get a handle on the situation and how I feel about it, but my emotions are a tangled, jumbled mess. All at once I feel isolation, profound sadness, panic, anxiety, anger, frustration, helplessness, fatigue, and, ironically, occasional joy and humor.

When I set out to review Dying: A Book of Comfort, I worried that I might be too close to the topic. But as I read passages in this anthology, my mixed feelings began to come into focus. I realized that perhaps I’m just the kind of person who should be reviewing a book like this. Read straight through, Dying: A Book of Comfort was a spiritual exercise for me. Some chapters let me look at dying from my father’s perspective. Other chapters simply gave me the perspective of people who have been through this before me and my family.

“Pat McNees’s collection contains carefully selected and ordered pieces – poems, prayers, prose, and fiction. The anthology explores a range of experiences: living when you know you are dying; caring for and about someone who is dying; saying goodbye; and dealing with how it feels to be left behind. When Pat was talking with publishers about printing a bookstore version, some told her it should be a book either about dying or about grieving, but Pat saw them as part of a continuum.

“If read straight through, the book’s structure allows the reader to move through the process of dying and grieving in an arc, starting with ‘Illness as Awakening.’ Following chapters examine how people who are dying, as well as their loved ones, experience the process of dying and saying goodbye. The apex of the arc is death itself, with chapters including views on immortality and prayer. The book then moves into the ‘Journey Through Grief.’ What follows are chapters devoted to mourning the loss of a child, parent, or spouse, and to grieving a sudden death or suicide. The closing chapters have their focus on death’s aftermath – the remembering, for example, or the other ways we deal with the ongoingness of this greatest of all losses.

“McNees has kept her selections fairly short. The brevity of the passages, and their concrete relevance to the topic at hand, make the book very reader-friendly. These characteristics reflect the advice of grief counselor, Kathleen Braza, who has found that people who are grieving generally can’t read long passages or process symbolism.

“The first time I read this book, I jumped around, the way I usually read a book of poetry. I’d read a passage here and there, periodically finding one that rang very true for me. Beyond being a personal comfort to me, I found the book to be an excellent resource. I’m often at a loss for words when talking with or writing to someone who is grieving. In its pages I have found just the right passage to share with friends of mine who have lost a mother, a husband, a son.

“While McNees didn’t set out to write a spiritual book, she has created a volume that speaks to the heart. Written after her father’s death, her goal in working on this project was to create a book that would help people through the process of death and grieving. Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of Hospice, says of Pat’s book, ‘This remarkable collection, coming from personal experience and wide reading, will help many find the potential of growth through loss.’

“ Dying: A Book of Comfort would make a thoughtful gift for a family or individual coping with terminal illness, someone who is grieving, or people who work with dying or bereaved. It is available in trade paperback at bookstores or in hardcover from the Literary Guild. My copy has already become dog-eared and annotated, as it travels with me to visit my father. Thanks, Pat, for the words of comfort."

~ Eileen Hanning’s review, years ago, for Signature, the newsletter of the Women’s National Book Association, DC chapter

TYLENOL TOXICITY
Pills or medicine labeled acetaminophen, "Tylenol," or "aspirin-free pain relief" may all contain acetaminophen. Combining such drugs is like taking poison: it may kill you or irreversibly damage your liver.

If you are in a suicide crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255

" Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none." ~ Lois Lowry